


Bouquet

by PunkHazard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 13:20:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7575484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blood, steel, polish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bouquet

Gabe doesn’t know what he was expecting when he dropped into Mercy’s office to get a gash over his eye stitched up, but their new arrival– who had until then been unconscious for something like two weeks, hooked up to half a dozen machines to keep him alive– sitting up in his hospital bed isn’t it. Shimada still has gauze stuck to the burnt patches on his face and body, one arm wrapped, the dressings stopping at the stump of his wrist. The other seems fine, except for the blisters and welts raised in third degree burns, flesh seared nearly to the bone. His hair’s been shaved to the scalp, though Gabe remembers the vibrant green it’d been when he brought the kid in.

“He has been catatonic for several days now,” Angela tells him as she sterilizes Gabriel’s cut and puts in two neat stitches. “I thought Caduceus technology might help him heal faster, but the prototype has been temperamental lately so I wanted to wait for Commandant Lindholm.”

Catatonic?

Gabe’s pretty sure that Shimada’s been tracking every movement in the room since he entered it. Maybe he shouldn’t expect a doctor, good as she is, to be able to smell the danger, violence and rage clinging to every fiber of Shimada’s ruined body, but Gabriel recognizes the scent of it. Blood, steel, polish.

When Mercy turns away, retreating to her office to enter something in her records, Gabe waves at Shimada, catching his attention. The slightest turn of his head, whites of his eyes visible as they flicker over. Gabe slides his palm across his own buzzcut, then points at Genji’s head. _Same hair!_  he mouths.

Shimada turns away again, back to staring straight ahead. Gabe swears he can see the corner of his lip quirk.

The next day, he brings Angela a cup of coffee for patching him up, nursing one of his own. Shimada’s on his back, staring at the ceiling, eyes open. Mercy had already begun to replace the life support devices with cybernetic alternatives, his chest cavity covered with aluminum plating to keep his heart and lungs working, synthetic muscles to protect what remains of his core. She’d removed most of his stomach, she said.

The room smells like antiseptic.

Gabriel lowers his nose to his cup, prying the plastic cover off with his bottom teeth. Coffee overwhelms his senses; bitter and heady, drowning out the sterile hospital scent. He pops the cap off the other one as well, spitting both caps into the trash and setting the cups by Genji’s bedside table. The kid’s eyes slide shut, soft hiss of his inhale just barely audible to Gabriel’s ears. He opens his eyes again, gaze fixed on Gabe’s face. Helpless, envious, pleading.

“Can you even smell anymore?”

Shimada probably can’t answer; something is off about the shape of his neck, as if it’d been caved in or crushed and Angela hasn’t gotten around to it just yet. Cyberization in stages, to allow his body time to heal between each procedure. Genji closes his eyes again, squeezes them shut, tears leaking out of the corners, slipping down past his temples and into his pillow.

“I know,” Gabe says, his voice rough. How many subordinates has he seen like this? Plenty of them around Genji’s age, some older, a few younger. “You used to be so strong. You used to climb walls with your bare fuckin’ hands.”

What could Reyes ever know? Standing powerful, tall, whole. Genji’s shoulders shake as he tries to choke back the gasps threatening to embarrass him along with the tears.

“Hey,” Gabe murmurs when Genji decides that it all hurts too much, every jolt of his body from choking back hiccups shifting gauze against open wounds and salty water stinging its way across his face. “You’ll be on your feet soon enough, kid. Don’t let ‘em see you cry.”

* * *

Winston left nothing but Athena to watch him while the rest of the Watchpoint retired. Reaper would have told him that’s a bad idea, if he were asked (or inclined to strengthen the security around his own imprisonment), but well, the ape was always more scientist than soldier. Lindholm had helped Mercy set up some sort of field to keep him corporeal, the rest of his body strapped to a hospital bed like some sort of mental patient (which, if Reaper were being honest with himself, might not be far from the truth).

Through a haze of shadows and unrelenting pain, Reaper vaguely notices a window high on the western wall creaking open, some dark figure crawling through and dropping soundlessly to the lab floor. It’s too quiet to be McCree, the sheer climb along the complex’s outside making the window accessible to only him and–

“Shimada,” Reaper says.

“Reyes,” Genji calls back as he approaches. Reaper can see the outline of Ryuu Ichimonji’s hilt in the cyborg’s silhouette, his lights dimmed to avoid tripping Athena’s sensors.

“Here to finish me off?” he asks, some vague hope that maybe this time, stuck in physical form, death might actually take. “Make it fast, kid.”

“I am not here to kill you,” says Genji, fitting a communicator into Reaper’s ear, moving fearlessly for someone with his hand so close to a monstrous face. “Lúcio wanted to give you this.”

Before he can ask what, exactly, that hyperactive DJ wants him to hear, Rejuvenescência’s mellow electronic beat streams from the earpiece. It’s been adjusted, as if custom-mixed for Reaper’s exact brand of suffering– volume high enough to drown out the hissing, staticky rush that dominates his waking hours but low enough that he can hear his surroundings just fine. “Oh,” he says, the knife-edge of pain skittering over his nerves dulling to a vague pressure.

“And this,” Genji continues, crushing something in his hand, “is from me.”

Some faint pungent, herbal scent wafts across what remains of Reaper’s nose. It triggers a familiar memory (tarragon? anise?), but when Genji unfurls his fingers, yellow petals and long green leaves sit bruised in his palm. “What the fuck, Shimada?”

He’d found the flowers in Mei’s garden, a patch she maintains with a little help from Bastion. Genji had only taken one, its fragrance tickling his nose when he’d accidentally stepped on it, a stray seed dropped outside of her raised bed. "Many years ago, my sense of smell was greatly damaged. You brought… two cups of coffee. I could still tell.”

Reaper looks away. “I remember.”

“When I felt most like I could never be human again, you did something for me that I will never forget.”

“That was… someone else.”

“I don’t believe that.” Reaper’s hand uncurls from a fist, gnarled fingers straining with some difficulty, his arm flexing against his restraints. Genji presses the pericón into his open palm, watching the yellow petals disappear in his grip. “If you need something,” he says, “I will be back.”

**Author's Note:**

> the prompt: when genji was first recovering from death, he couldn't eat, so reyes would show up with fresh coffee or fresh flowers or fresh herbs - lots of aromatic things so that genji would have SOMETHING around that wasn't full clinical hospital stuff. now that reaper's captured by overwatch and is full of nanomachines, he can't eat like Normal often - so genji decides to return the favor and bring Reaper things to comfort him, starting with fresh marigolds.


End file.
